You Want This Sometimes
by Gypsy Love
Summary: A Snake and Darcy story thanks to the suggestion of melliflous cloud in a review. I think I might like them.
1. Chapter 1

Guilty feelings all over the place. I used to think I was such a good guy, just a solid, all around, good guy. I fell for Spike and won over her daughter because I was just basically decent. Spike. Jesus. The girl had sort of terrified me when we were in school. The hair, she was like some British punk. And the baby. She gets pregnant in eighth grade and she keeps the baby. Says basically fuck you to the school, her teachers, her mom, and she keeps it. That's balls.

Things had changed, of course. We grew up, Emma was growing up, Spike's look softened and she had the trendy little hairdos of everyone else and I felt I could approach her. She wasn't a 14 year old with a baby but a 28 year old with a kid in junior high. Earaches and changing diapers and spitting up and all that was over, not that it would have fazed me.

Turns out she's still a terrifying British punk inside. Maybe it's because she was a mother so young and had to forcefully advocate for herself and Emma at such a young age but she always had to demand that things be how she wanted them. Our marriage wasn't a partnership, it was like a ship and she was the captain. I was somewhere below swabbing the deck.

This was first evident to me when I kissed Hatzilakos in the movie theater. I was making a break for independence. I was being a colossal idiot in the bargain, risking losing my marriage, my kids, my life as I knew it. But it was hard to be a man when Christine did that so well herself.

Like Joey. Not to tread on the sainted Julia, and granted they did seem pretty happy together, but how would it all have played out? They weren't married all that long, they had the new baby, the new little house, picket fence. Little dream world in a bubble, and I remember Joey's smile that seemed almost painful, that brief time after Angela was born and before Julia got sick. But marriages aren't what they're cracked up to be, what might have happened if she lived? What cracks would have been exposed?

Emma was grown up, a woman right before my very eyes. A glamorous woman, tall and thin and blond with a smile that was cool and icy, aloof. Spike was never as glamorous as her daughter. How did this happen? And then there was Jack, my little man. Blond with bright red cheeks like one of those old illustrations of kids from the 30's and 40's. Jack wasn't as much Christine's as Emma was. Jack was a real kid to her, whereas she sort of grew up with Emma, and I could see the blurring of boundaries between them. They were closer than any mother/daughter I'd ever seen. They were different aspects of each other. They bled into each other. With Jack she knew her boundaries. She was all grown up. They both were.

Sigh. Having my cracked whole wheat toast in the morning with natural, no preservative jam. Fruit juice with no high fructose corn syrup and besides sushi I haven't had meat for years. Did I mind this ultra healthy, ultra natural diet? No. No, of course I didn't. But sometimes I wanted a fast food hamburger and greasy fries loaded with preservatives, loaded with ketchup. Triclycerides. Fatty acids. Clogged arteries. You want this sometimes. Long for this. That's what Hatzilakos was for me, a bag of shoestring fries cooked in the fattiest oil available. It wasn't good for me but damn did it taste good.

But I was good. A good husband, a decent man. I went back to Spike, atoned for my transgression. Vowed to live lean and pure for the rest of my days. But I was like some stray dog suddenly chained to the bulkhead in the backyard, scratching the grass into raw dirt. I wanted out.

Emma was nearly out of high school. Model-like, ethereal and beautiful, she glided through the halls she once ran down with so much energy, thinking of new ideas for her projects, ponytails flying. I miss that. I miss when she was like that. And Manny, little Manny, grown up, too. A curvaceous flirtatious woman all her own. I had to shake my head at these cocoon transformations. How did these full fledged human beings emerge when I wasn't even looking?

Craig was gone, a drug addict gone to rehab. I used to have to keep my eye on him for Joey because Joey was so paranoid things would go wrong with him. He wanted to do right by Craig for his ghost mother, I was sure. Trying to please the dead was always a tricky business. And now Joey was gone, too. It was hard to say how much I missed him. He'd been one of my moorings.

But we go on, do we not? Jack was learning, growing, becoming. And I hated to say it but that little twist of DNA we shared endeared him to me in a way Emma couldn't. At the deep genetic level Emma was Shane's, and that was a shame what happened to him. Acid, trippy concert, parent hood on the horizon. He lost his head. If he'd kept his head like Spike did he could have had a meaningful life with Emma, he could have fought for his right to be a part of her life and he would have won.

I had a bit of an awkward relationship with Hatzilakos, the kiss between us. She was a beautiful creature, wide smile, wide hips, everything there and in the right places, and she had that little devil son of hers, Peter, giving her a run for the money. I'd been around kids a long time and that kid may have had issues but he also enjoyed a certain sort of havoc he created.

And then there was Darcy. Darcy was relatively new to me, just recently a student in my class. She was delicately thin, almost like a waif. Deep soulful eyes hiding a new pain. I could just look at any of these teenagers and could read them like a blind man reads brail. Could touch on all their issues just by looking at their handwriting. She'd been hurt somehow, by someone, violated in one way or another and she was trying to construct the mask that would hide that. I could always see through those masks. I saw her anger just under the calm surface, like a smooth blue lake hiding a volcano. The nearly imperceptible ripples of water gave it all away.

I didn't even feel guilty for wanting to get to know her, to have the secret revealed so we could begin to piece her soul back together again. For wanting to kiss those slight lips, hold the silky light brown hair beneath my freckled hand.

I watched the anger simmer there day after day, speculated on its source. Speculated on ways I could spend more time with her. Bright dark challenge of a girl. How could I help? What could I do? Went home to Christine, watched the lines around her eyes and between them grow deeper. Watched Emma breeze in and out, her life off and running now, no stopping it like some train until it crashed. Watched Jack explore and learn things I felt I've always known.

Looking forward to my class with Darcy without guilt. Watched her enter the classroom, her books hugged to her chest like armor, head down. Every muscle movement screamed that she was hurt. Hurting. I could kiss all that hurt away. I watched her in that way I've perfected over the years, that way in which no one could tell. My eyes playing over her wavy hair, the delicate cheek bones, the thin line of her neck, collar bones poking at the skin so you wanted to scream, "eat a candy bar!" despite loving the delicateness, the breakable aspect of her.

We were all breakable, though. My marriage had broken me. It sucked at my self worth like some raven haired vampire, taking and taking and never dying. I didn't know it would be like this. Caitlin broke Joey, her endless promises and her endless leaving on good causes. She was not the Julia he was trying to make her be. And Craig broke Joey, being so out of control, so damaged the moment he showed up. And Craig was himself broken, the years of abuse and the death of his parents taking their toll before the diagnosis of bipolar, drug addiction.

So I watched Darcy with my broken eyes and wanted her to turn her eyes to me. To begin to ignite the tiny spark of connection. The years between us hardly mattered. What were years? Time? It always fit into the equation but how? The scientists all said time travel was possible. Maybe I could spin around and find the way, come back and make everything right before it all went so horribly wrong.

Darcy, skinny girl in a square of cold sunlight, her eyes resting for brief seconds on the heads of her classmates, on the plastic corners of the computer screens, on the ceramic apple on my desk. My eyes rested on her.


	2. Chapter 2

I didn't know what to say half the time. Didn't know what to do. Did so much of what I did on auto-pilot. Teaching was down to a science for me now. I knew what the kids would do before they did it. Except Darcy. She was more like a woman to me, and more of a mystery. Sure, I could look at her doe eyes and know of some sadness that plagued her, knew of some violence that had reached her, but that was one thing and this was another.

Home to Spike, and love had evaporated. She had worn me down. So we weren't right for each other. Yet I feared pissing her off, feared her power over me and Jack, her pull on Emma, who I loved like my very own step-daughter.

Joey's absence weighed on me. Joey. So he was gone from my day to day. So Christine spent so much of her time pissing me off. So Emma was caught up in the whirlwind of early adulthood. So Jack was still too little. It wasn't like I was alone.

Daydreams of kissing Darcy. Cupping her face in my hands, her eyes lifting up to mine. Tasting that sweet taste of her. I could hide it. None of that showed on my face as I gazed at her in class. Everyone else pale around her. I wanted to taste her tears, ingest her pain. Make things better in small ways, if I could. I knew I could.

Passing Hatzilakos in the halls, her hips swaying back and forth, and she walked with the powerful stride of her position. I didn't begrudge her or blame her for our indiscretion. She gave me that distracted smile, the 'I don't have time for you' smile. And I smiled back in turn.

Drinking too much coffee again, and it hurts me before it feels good. Blood levels are off again. Sometimes I fear the cancer recurring, moving slow like the best killers. But it's not forever. I know that we're here for only the brief flash and then gone, but somehow I feel that I'm immortal.

I can't seem to hear the things Christine says to me, can't seem to focus. Is it her fault I don't love her? I don't know what is who's fault anymore. Things have gone into the gray. Even staring at my wife's face I can think of Darcy, her delicate mouth, the dark circles beneath her eyes.

Making the pilgrimage to visit Joey because I had to get away. And the drive was nice. Thoughts of Darcy sort of swirling in my brain, and I could follow them if I wanted to. Up to Calgary, Craig in rehab there. I'd done my last duty by him for Joey, making sure he got on that plane. He was so thin, and looked thinner because he was tall. Dark circles under his eyes, too. That desperate jaggedness he had had, and I knew the pain he was causing Joey. I knew the essential hopelessness of Craig's life and Joey couldn't seem to see it. I had been at that airport for Joey, not for Craig.

Darcy. Spike. Joey. Craig. People kind of flew through my life, in and out like great sweeping birds now flying south, now flying across the Atlantic. Flying away from me. I was a tree. I was a rock.

I felt some pain, some pain from not loving Spike anymore. Pain from wanting Darcy and she was too young. Hadn't I lectured Mr. O. for less? He was closer to Paige's age. I could be Darcy's father. I wasn't just some fly by night student teacher with long messy hair and choker necklaces and bongs in my slum apartment. No. I was a father. My daughter in fact was older than Darcy. I had a house. A career. A wife. Was I willing to risk it all for that sweet kiss? To caress that soft skin? To taste her secret pain? What exactly was I willing to sacrifice in all of this?

I didn't know myself. I didn't know what I was willing to do. I was untested. Soft. Green. Growing gray and still untested by the fires. I'd melt. Die for sure. I felt the essential weakness in me, had my entire life. The road flew by, the music blasting because I needed it to. Needed something to drown out my thoughts for a bit. It would be good to see Joey again. With Joey I could still pretend that I was young, a kid in the school I taught at because we had been kids together.

I saw Joey's new house, parked my car and went up to the door , my legs feeling weak from all the driving. He opened the door with his wide smile and I smiled back, my secret hiding things smile, and let him envelope me.

Half unpacked, boxes labeled in bold black permanent marker. He got me a mug of coffee and I doctored it up like a kid, sugars and cream. Asked about his good kid first.

"How's Angie?" He smiled and said good, said she was making friends and I smiled back at him and asked about his bad kid.

"How's Craig?" He frowned but then smiled a little and said better, he was sticking with the treatment and back on his meds and all of that. He asked about my kids and I told him a bit of Emma's seemingly glamorous existence, about Jack's baby discoveries. He didn't ask about Spike. Psychic Joey, he knew my thoughts had turned. Like the planet's face away from the sun, like the moon slipping below the horizon, he knew.

It was sometimes easy to think about Craig in relation to Joey. How fucked up Craig was and how Joey couldn't see it. He was a drug addict. He was mentally ill. He was abused. His parents were dead, both of them were dead by the time he was 14. You don't recover from that easily, if at all, despite how great Joey was with him. He couldn't fix him. But those easy judging thoughts could turn back on me and I'd have to question what it was I wasn't seeing clearly in my own life. What was the fucked up mess I wouldn't be able to fix?

I tried not to think so much, tried not to see Darcy's face in my mind's eye. My third eye. Tried not to recall the scent of her shampoo and perfume and fruity gum. Tried not to think of Spike's aging eyes and mouth, her impatience and sharp voice. Tried not to think of myself on the hamster's wheel, spinning around and around and thinking I was actually getting somewhere.

Angie came home and I noticed how much taller she had got, how much older seeming, sounding, looking. I remembered when she was born, had gone to the hospital that day and saw her, the little scrap of a newborn with all the dark hair, dark little eyes. What did it mean that I'd seen her practically at birth and now she was a growing up human being? Did this point to mortality, too?

Sighed. Darcy wouldn't leave my mind. Didn't know how I'd make the inroads to her life, become a part of her things but I would do it. Whatever the sacrifice I was willing to make it. Maybe it was clear now. Clearer. Like the murky pond settling and the things on the bottom emerging.

Joey got me more coffee when my mug was done without asking because he knew I'd have more. It was good to have friends who knew you like you almost knew yourself, and I accepted the cup.

"Want to visit Craig?" Joey said. I raised my eyebrows in surprise.

"He can have visitors?"

Joey smiled, a sad funny little smile, and sipped his coffee.

"Even prisoners can have visitors," he said, and I nodded, digested that. I felt like a prisoner, too. Prisoner of my marriage, my job, my desires. My son. My step-daughter. They were all links in the chains that my life had forged. How accurately Dickens had explained it. Chains were forged in life. Everyday.

So we went to the rehab place and it looked sort of like a hospital. Visiting Craig again in a screwed up place because of his screwed up life. It sort of made me tired, it must exhaust Joey. Angela and Joey had this brave acceptance of it, I could see it in their eyes. Maybe I was going to cry and wondered if I'd be just as loyal if Emma was like that. Sure I would. Her eating disorder had been similar, maybe, and I'd stuck through.


	3. Chapter 3

Driving home, the road unfurls all faded blue before me, the sky that big sky they talk about in certain history books. My hands gripped the wheel, and I noticed how old they were looking. Like my father's hands, pale and freckled and rough, such old hands when I would put my little hands next to his. Sometimes it scared me to see these signs of age. Can't pluck the gray hairs.

I thought of the sad acceptance I had seen on Joey's face when we were talking to Craig, and I realized that maybe Joey had given up hope concerning Craig. Craig himself was oblivious, still in the pain of kicking an addiction, restless and edgy.

I welcomed the long drive back to Toronto, seemed the only place I could think anymore was in the car, the movement and the motion lulling me. I needed to be lulled. Spike's face would rise before me in its terribleness, lined eyes, thin hair, and that voice. My name on her lips made me want to curl up into the fetal position. I blinked, the glare of sun off cars and windows making my eyes ache and I put on my sunglasses. The glare slashed and I blinked in relief. Something was wrong with my marriage.

Powerless, more and more, like a piece of kelp in the rip tide, swirling along with the currents, no will. I went to my house and my wife and kissed her perfunctorily, saw my son pushing some toy trucks around the area rug. Cartoons on the T.V. flashed and babbled behind him, and I felt the wave of love for him that was familiar yet different each time. Two hectic spots of red were on his pale cheeks.

Christine regarded me with her faded eyes, and I saw that I was no more important than a large piece of furniture to her. Necessary, perhaps, but not something that required much thought. I licked my lips and blinked rapidly, tried to dull the red flash of anger that made me want to slap her.

Hiding behind the newspaper just like my father and grandfather had, and now I wondered, were they in a loveless and sour marriage like I was? Were they burying their heads in the sand and not rocking the status quo? Was this manner of meekness passed down from father to son like blue eyes or left handedness?

School, another prison and sanctuary. I strode toward the double glass doors that reflected the blue sky, reached my hand toward my dim reflection's hand and grabbed the handle, swung the doors wide. In the halls I towered over most of the students except for the odd basketball player or two. Listened as the lockers opened and closed, the sound of the lockers the music I'd been hearing for 20 years or more. Like some sort of native drumming, native calls on distant beaches, fire flickering in the girls' eyes. But in these ancient cultures each sound had meant something, each action represented something. We've lost all that. The lockers opening and closing has no meaning, is not connected to anything.

Emma glided down the halls, Manny in tow. Her blond hair like metal, her brown eyes an odd contrast. Mixed genes. Blond was supposed to go with blue but it crosses sometimes. I blink and she's gone. Then, behind the books she clings to, I see Darcy. Waif thin, eyes red and puffy from her recent cry, collar bones jutting out with frightening clarity. I watch her, and time slows. I can hear the slow breathing of the universe, that OM that is sometimes clear. Radio frequencies. Darcy looks at me for just a second as she passes, and I smile a tight rictus of a smile.

My classroom, the computers all in rows like soldiers. Plastic and metal chairs scraping on the linoleum as the kids pull them out and sit, push them back in. I close my eyes and listen to the familiar hum of the computers coming to life. Sometimes I feel melded to my keyboard, sometimes I feel immersed in the LCD screen. Sometimes, most times, I am far more comfortable in the computer world than the people world, and I have to force myself to look at and interact with other human beings, sometimes.

This is not the class that Darcy's in and I mourn that fact. I wanted to see her, I longed to see her, to maybe speak slightly above a whisper in her ear. To heal whatever is wrong, whatever has damaged her beyond repair.

I bought a brown bag lunch, a secret bologna sandwich on white bread. White bread filled with fast carbs and empty calories and very little nutrients. Classic yellow mustard. Spike would freak at my woeful misappropriation of calories. But as they say, what Spike doesn't know really can not hurt her. And the easy familiar food is so comforting at times like these, times when I don't know exactly who I am or what it is I want. So I chew and I swallow and I guzzle soda, which Spike knows rots your stomach and intestines, and I gobble the store brand oreos. Junk food, cheap junk food at that, but I need it. I crave it.

"Mr. Simpson?"

I am alone in my classroom, eating my clandestine lunch, the computers all humming around me. The voice, achingly familiar, startles me and I nearly choke on a perfect bite of Oscar Mayor, classic yellow, and wonder.

Darcy. Still holding the books like armor, head down, eyes up, burning into me. Her arms are so thin, delicate, like Angelina Jolie's.

"Uh, yes, Darcy?" My voice sounds funny, she must know what the huskiness in it means. I can feel the pedestal I'd stood on start to chip and crumble, great white squares of plaster falling to the linoleum, giving off that poof of dust.

"Can I talk to you?" Her voice is quiet, breaking, weak. Her eyes tremble with tears, just a shine of tears that isn't ready to fall. I see her nails as she clutches the hard cover books firmly to her chest, I can see the nail polish chipping off, the raggedness from her biting. The nail polish was a pale lavender, almost too pale to see. But I can see it. I notice everything.

I was sitting behind my big gray desk, just an industrial gray steel. Next to the desk is a golden yellow wooden chair that was sanded and shiny with lacquer. But in the seat of the chair and the back the lacquer has worn away from years of students sitting there. Darcy sat there and set her books down on the edge of my desk. She looked strangely defenseless without them, exposed. I looked at the pile of books, the textbook covers looking like little rats with sharp teeth had knawed one corner, the edges of the pages black with dirt and grime.

So I waited, the sandwich forgotten, Emma and her glamorous life and glamorous body forgotten, Spike and her sharp lined face and sharp tongue forgotten, Jack and his chubby little fist curled around a crayon as he made me a picture forgotten. Everything, everything flew out of my head. Hatzilakos and her swaying hips and sexy eyes, kissable lips, gone. Joey being miles away, mired in the problems of a mentally ill drug addict, gone, gone. I stared into Darcy's large eyes, hypnotized. I felt like I was breathing helium. My head was about to float away.

"Mr. Simpson, I've been…" Broken voice, and the tears that were just a shine were falling down her cheeks, and there was no more. Head down, eyes down, the long lashes dark with her tears, her shoulders shaking, I just continued to stare. The halls were empty, the lockers silent for once. Just a hint of chalk dust in the air, the hum of the computers filling my head, and I saw the lights reflecting off her tears. Saw the way her knees were together, her hands in her lap. I took a deep breath.

"Darcy," I said, her name wrong and right on my outbound breath, the deep timbre of my voice appropriate. Sometimes things were as they were supposed to be. I reached out my hand, slowly, and touched her shoulder. Just bone, so skinny, so tense, and it was like touching a live wire that was jerking and convulsing on the road.


	4. Chapter 4

She left so suddenly, but I could still feel every sinew of her beneath my hand. In the air that had been disturbed by the suddenness of her wake, I stared. The food unchewed in my mouth. I was breathing in chalk dust. One by one other students filled the hall, obscuring Darcy, closing in and over her and I wondered if I'd even seen her at all.

Did I sense disapproving stares from Hatzilakos later that day? Or was I paranoid? I hadn't actually done anything wrong. Priests and teachers and even my parents whispered from the depths of my childhood, 'even thinking it is wrong,' I hung my head in a new shame. So I had thought it. So I wanted to kiss that girl who had her defenses up. Kiss her and maybe something more. I was afraid to think the things I was desiring.

Roaming over it all in my mind, the way my wife sickened me, and then I sickened myself. I thought back to our frantic wedding day, and how the days leading up to it should have been a warning. The only mature one then was Emma. Had I got married like some scared kid in high school who had knocked up the prom queen? Had I really lived my life with that breathless degree of haphazardness?

The food had become this lead ball in my mouth and I spit it into the gray metal trash can that had sat like a dog next to my desk for ten years, fifteen years, twenty. How long had I been caught in this web of a job? I'd lost track, lost count, and the numbers didn't matter at this point. Sticky spider web job. But was I the spider or the fly?

Cryptic thinking, cryptic thoughts, and I really didn't want to kill Spike on any conscious level. I wished I could peer inside of myself like some mad scientist with a thick lens and see if any part of me loved her still. The ring on my finger kept shining in the dim overhead lights.

I wished Joey was still here, still down the street and I could run some version of this by him. Maybe he'd know what to do. I certainly didn't. And was I sick enough to envy Joey having a dead wife? A clean slate? I hadn't seen my own slate in years.

Maybe love had run its course with me and Spike. Maybe it was what it was but it was over now. I licked my lips and tasted the tang of the cheap mustard, rubbed my hands smoothed by decades of chalk dust. Maybe I was rationalizing. Could I stick with the tedious job of my marriage like Joey had stuck with the task of trying to save Craig? After all, there was no one who was dead who I was trying to please. Maybe rationalization wasn't as bad as it sounded. Maybe it was finally me being rational.

I squinted my eyes when I thought of Spike, like trying to protect myself from a sand storm or the harsh mid afternoon rays of the sun. But when I thought of Darcy I felt my whole face soften, felt my eyes grow naturally wide like a wondrous child. So what if I wanted to taste her lips and kiss away her pain? So what if I was old enough to be above her. My position as teacher, as mid thirties, as father, these did not take away my desire. It did not take away my ability to be surprised by another human being. Of course it would be easier for me if she was more appropriate. If she was my age, or I was hers.

The school day had reached that place of suspended animation, where the giant red second hand on the clock wouldn't move. I took a deep breath, and when I breathed in deep enough I could sometimes smell the way the school had smelled when I was 14. I could sometimes almost fall in my mind back to that place and time. Place. Still the same place, but only in a way. Sometimes only in name. So many years had passed and each one lay like a thin film on the last year, and together they obscured anything I had ever known, anyone I had ever been. My marriage did that, too. It buried me. I'd have to dig and dig to find myself again.

Mid day. I would patiently wait until I would see Darcy again. I would eat apples, I would drink flavored water, I would show my false face to the world. I could wait. I could toy with the idea of divorce without bringing it out of my mouth. It was so easy to keep things theoretical.


End file.
